Page 61 of The Maverick
"You think?”
"I don't know him very well."
"You knew him well enough."
I looked at her. She looked back without apology.
"Tasha."
"I'm just saying what's true."
I turned back to the window. "He travels for work. A lot. He's been—" I tried to remember the places he'd mentioned andrealized he hadn't really mentioned places. He'd mentioned the Army. Valentine. The fact that his work took him places. "He goes a lot of places," I finished. "He doesn't stay anywhere long."
"Is that what he said?"
"It's what I inferred."
"From what?"
I thought about it. From the way he'd moved through The Carolinian like a man passing through, not a man in his city. From the lightness of him—not emotionally, not personally, but physically. The easy way he'd sat down to donuts with a stranger like a man who was good at making wherever he was into somewhere. Like he'd practiced it. Like he'd had to.
"He's not from here," I said. "He's from Valentine, originally, but he doesn't live there. He doesn't say where he lives." I paused. "He just—appears. In cities. For his work."
"That could mean a lot of things."
"It could."
"Does it bother you?"
I held my mug in both hands and thought about it honestly, the way he'd made me get used to thinking about things. "I don't know yet," I said. "Ask me when I know more."
Tasha nodded. She sipped her coffee.
"He played your guitar beautifully," she said.
"I know."
"Devon cried a little."
"Devon did not cry."
"Devon's eyes got wet. He'd call it allergies. I call it crying."
I smiled into my mug.
I went back to my room after Tasha left for wherever Tasha went on her days off, and I sat on the edge of my bed and looked at the space where he'd been.
The pillow on his side still held the shape of him. I didn't fix it. I sat there and looked at it and thought about the kind of life that produced a man like Tommy.
I'd grown up with people who stayed. That was the fundamental fact of Caton's Chapel—people stayed. They were born there and they married there and they died there and their children did the same, and the mountains held them the way mountains held everything, which was completely and without discussion. My daddy had never lived anywhere but Sevier County. My mama's people went back four generations in the same holler. Even the ones who left—the ones who went to Knoxville for college or to Nashville for work—came back eventually, pulled by the gravity of the place that had their roots.
Tommy had roots in Valentine and then the Army had pulled him loose from them, and whatever came after had kept him loose. Now, he was a man who moved through cities with ease.
I didn't know what that looked like from the inside.
I knew what it looked like from where I was sitting, which was: a man who could be anywhere and had been here, in this small room, in this small bed, and had chosen to stay the night and the morning and had eaten my mama's raspberry jam off toast and pressed his forehead to mine in a shower like we were speaking the same language.
I knew what that felt like. I didn't know what it meant, yet.
